From: Alexandru Onea <onea.alex@gmail.com>
To: "Richard Earnshaw (lists)" <Richard.Earnshaw@arm.com>
Cc: binutils@sourceware.org
Subject: Re: arm-none-eabi-as: what decides .text section alignment/padding?
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2023 19:01:39 +0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAJgSc4wDXjAnxD26qmW-cH4G2Uu4qa-nuB783p9vyLHo0kWnvA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <b33d5578-d57e-305d-bdb4-1f32d50342bf@arm.com>
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4700 bytes --]
Therefore, is it that the only difference between the two cases shown in my
example boils down to whether the assembler sees an instruction or not?
I understand it as follows:
Case A: .text section with no instruction within, the assembler says "this
monkey asks me to put data in a .text section, whatever, maybe where he
comes from .text means something else"
Case B: .text section with data and at least one instruction, the assembler
says "this monkey now crosses the line, if he wants instructions, I must
make sure that at least other .text sections can be merged into it"
So does the assembler assume that if there are no instructions in a .text
section, maybe it is not actually a .text section in the classical sense?
Best regards,
Alexandru N. Onea
On Mon, 19 Jun 2023 at 16:31, Richard Earnshaw (lists) <
Richard.Earnshaw@arm.com> wrote:
> On 19/06/2023 08:14, Alexandru Onea via Binutils wrote:
> > Hello, community!
> >
> > I am playing with arm-none-eabi-as trying to understand how it aligns
> > sections. I have the following source:
> >
> > ; source.s
> > .text
> > .byte 0xff
> > .byte 0xff
> > .byte 0xff
> >
> > I am inspecting the resulting object file:
> >
> > $ arm-none-eabi-as -mthumb -o source.o source.s
> > $ arm-none-eabi-readelf -S source.o
> > There are 8 section headers, starting at offset 0xec:
> >
> > Section Headers:
> > [Nr] Name Type Addr Off Size ES Flg
> Lk Inf Al
> > [ 0] NULL 00000000 000000 000000 00
> > 0 0 0* [ 1] .text PROGBITS 00000000 000034
> > 000003 00 AX 0 0 1
> > * [ 2] .data PROGBITS 00000000 000037 000000 00
> > WA 0 0 1
> > [ 3] .bss NOBITS 00000000 000037 000000 00 WA
> 0 0 1
> > [ 4] .ARM.attributes ARM_ATTRIBUTES 00000000 000037 000014 00
> 0 0 1
> > [ 5] .symtab SYMTAB 00000000 00004c 000060 10
> 6 6 4
> > [ 6] .strtab STRTAB 00000000 0000ac 000004 00
> 0 0 1
> > [ 7] .shstrtab STRTAB 00000000 0000b0 00003c 00
> 0 0 1
> >
> > The .text section is byte-aligned and contains the 3 bytes.
> >
> > Now, I add an instruction to source.s:
> >
> > ; source.s
> > .text
> > .byte 0xff
> > nop
> > .byte 0xff
> > .byte 0xff
> >
> > Looking into the object file, now all of a sudden the .text section is
> > halfword-aligned:
> >
> > There are 8 section headers, starting at offset 0x114:
> >
> > Section Headers:
> > [Nr] Name Type Addr Off Size ES Flg
> Lk Inf Al
> > [ 0] NULL 00000000 000000 000000 00
> > 0 0 0* [ 1] .text PROGBITS 00000000 000034
> > 000006 00 AX 0 0 2
> > * [ 2] .data PROGBITS 00000000 00003a 000000 00
> > WA 0 0 1
> > [ 3] .bss NOBITS 00000000 00003a 000000 00 WA
> 0 0 1
> > [ 4] .ARM.attributes ARM_ATTRIBUTES 00000000 00003a 000014 00
> 0 0 1
> > [ 5] .symtab SYMTAB 00000000 000050 000080 10
> 6 8 4
> > [ 6] .strtab STRTAB 00000000 0000d0 000007 00
> 0 0 1
> > [ 7] .shstrtab STRTAB 00000000 0000d7 00003c 00
> 0 0 1
> >
> > What is causing the assembler to decide to pad the section in the second
> > case? I am confused because:
> >
> > 1. if the section is .data then the assembler will not pad it anyway,
> > which makes sense, but
> > 2. even if the section is .text, the assembler won't pad it unless it
> > sees an instruction (I can have as many data directives, the section
> won't
> > be padded without having also an instruction), and finally
> > 3. the nop instruction is definitely not aligned and the assembler
> has
> > no problem with it, but it still decides to care about section
> alignment.
> >
> > How is the assembler deciding here to align and pad the section? Can I
> > force the assembler to not pad the .text section even if I have an
> > instruction?
>
> You've told the assembler to interpret the contents of the source file
> as containing thumb instructions. Thumb instructions must be (at least)
> two byte aligned (the fact that your source file deliberately misaligns
> the instruction is a bug in your code). If the section were not aligned
> then the linker would not be able to correctly merge consecutive
> sections if you had a mix of data-only text sections (like your first
> example) and sections containing code.
>
> Note that if you had used -marm instead of -mthumb the alignment would
> be set to 4 as all 'arm' instructions must be 4-byte aligned.
>
> R.
>
>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-06-19 16:01 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-06-19 7:14 Alexandru Onea
2023-06-19 13:31 ` Richard Earnshaw (lists)
2023-06-19 16:01 ` Alexandru Onea [this message]
2023-06-19 16:22 ` Richard Earnshaw (lists)
2023-06-19 16:39 ` Alexandru Onea
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